Ecological Status of Areas Awarded to Tribals Under Forest Rights Act 2006–A Geospatial Study of Adilabad Forest Division, Telangana, India

Forest fragmentation and deforestation are major causes of biodiversity loss around the globe. Owing to high human and cattle population in India, the immense pressure on natural resources has led to greater degradation of natural ecosystems. The land-scape-level changes have in turn resulted in changes in species diversity and composition. Adilabad district has the largest proportion of forest area in Telangana, India. We studied the impact of land right awards granted under the Recognition of Forest Rights Act (RoFR), 2006 in the Adilabad Division. We hypothe-size that the forest area awarded to the tribal under RoFR and illegal encroachment in forests have ad-versely impacted the forest biodiversity. To verify our hypothesis, we calculated edge density (ED), patch density (PD) and core area index (CAI) of all the Re-serve Forest areas using FRAGSTATS and compared the results with the pre-RoFR situation. Our results indicate that ED and PD increased predominantly across the Reserve Forest blocks where a large num-ber of rights was granted under RoFR, whereas CAI decreased. Statistically for all the three parameters, pre- and post-RoFR values were found to be signifi-cantly different indicating that the changes due to im-plementation of RoFR have a significant adverse impact on the forests. Our findings are consistent with our hypothesis, and indicate that the continued use of forest areas for agriculture in RoFR and encroach-ment areas may further adversely impact the ecosystem. There is an urgent need to identify and implement conservation actions that would allow restoration of biodiversity of the Reserve Forest areas adversely affected by land rights awarded under RoFR. Measures such as aggregation of the scattered RoFR areas towards the Reserve Forest boundary and im-proved agricultural practices such as agroforestry may alleviate such adverse impacts.